What can you do about boredom? Obviously, there are times when you are stuck. If you are listening to a lecture that you cannot leave, then you just need to find a way to get through it. When you have some control, though, use your understanding of boredom to help you out. If you can, try to do a meditation exercise to lower your arousal level. Also, keep some music handy. Music you enjoy can crowd out distractions in the environment. It can also influence your mood in positive ways to counteract the pain of being bored.
The bored antihero became prominent in early 20th century existentialist works such as Franz Kafka's The Metamorphosis (1915),[43] Jean-Paul Sartre's La Nausée (1938) (French for 'Nausea'),[44] and Albert Camus' L'Étranger (1942) (French for 'The Stranger').[45] The protagonist in these works is an indecisive central character who drifts through his life and is marked by ennui, angst, and alienation.[46]
In contexts where one is confined, spatially or otherwise, boredom may be met with various religious activities, not because religion would want to associate itself with tedium, but rather, partly because boredom may be taken as the essential human condition, to which God, wisdom, or morality are the ultimate answers. Many existentialist philosophers, like Arthur Schopenhauer, espouse this view. This view of religiosity among boredom does affect how often people are bored. People who had a higher religiosity while performing boring task, reported less boredom than people of less religiosity. People performing the meaningless task had to search less for meaning.[24]
In Experience Without Qualities: Boredom and Modernity, Elizabeth Goodstein traces the modern discourse on boredom through literary, philosophical, and sociological texts to find that as "a discursively articulated phenomenon...boredom is at once objective and subjective, emotion and intellectualization—not just a response to the modern world but also a historically constituted strategy for coping with its discontents."[3] In both conceptions, boredom has to do fundamentally with an experience of time and problems of meaning.

Grunge lit is an Australian literary genre of fictional or semi-autobiographical writing in the early 1990s about young adults living in an "inner cit[y]" "...world of disintegrating futures where the only relief from...boredom was through a nihilistic pursuit of sex, violence, drugs and alcohol".[47] Often the central characters are disfranchised, lacking drive and determination beyond the desire to satisfy their basic needs. It was typically written by "new, young authors"[47] who examined "gritty, dirty, real existences"[47] of everyday characters. It has been described as both a sub-set of dirty realism and an offshoot of Generation X literature.[48] Stuart Glover states that the term "grunge lit" takes the term "grunge" from the "late 80s and early 90s—...Seattle [grunge] bands".[49] Glover states that the term "grunge lit" was mainly a marketing term used by publishing companies; he states that most of the authors who have been categorized as "grunge lit" writers reject the label.[49]

People who lack self-awareness are more prone to boredom. A bored individual is unable to articulate what it is that he or she desires or wants to do. They have trouble describing their feelings. An inability to know what will make one happy can lead to a more profound existential boredom. Not knowing what we are searching for means that we lack the capacity to choose appropriate goals for engagement with the world (Eastwood, 2012).